How can I rank my website so that it actually starts to get traffic?

I've been trying to rank my site for a few months now, and I can't get a single visitor besides bots. What could I be doing wrong? I checked the robots.txt file to make sure traffic wasn't being blocked, I indexed the pages using Google Webmaster, and I made Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest Accounts...and also a Facebook page. I followed lots of people on Twitter so even have a good number of followers back, but it's harder to do on the other sites...

But I've heard that if you choose low competition niches you don't even need backlinks! I did choose low competition keywords so what am I doing wrong? Anyone else experience this?

I think that we need to know more what is your site about. Keep in mind that content is really important and then of course right marketing and advertisement. It takes lot of time to build some customer base. There is lot of very good tips and tricks here on Warrior about that.

1) If you can give the URL of your site, maybe we could give a more relevant opinion.

2) I speak as a former SEO consultant. Nowadays, SEO tricks do not work so much. The three main criteria used by Google to rank a page are:

a) evaluating the page with their artificial intelligence system called RakeBrain,

b) the user behavior with the help of Google Chrome, Android and other Google tools: Does the user click on the link of your site in the SERPs? How many time the visitor stays on the page? Does he look at other pages on your site ? Is that he slowly scrolls the page (he's reading)? Does he mark the page in his favorites? The visitor returns to the page another day? etc.

c) and especially backlinks

3) Personally I have never had any problems to get good organic results. Then I will tell you this; Choose the best keywords (enough traffic but not too much competition). Try writing the best web page about the keywords you choose. Type your keywords in Google and look at the pages that appear in the first 10 results. Then give yourself a goal to make a page as good (or better) than those 10 pages.

Conclusion:

When a user types some keywords in Google, this visitor hope Google will give him the best pages on the web related to these keywords. And usually that's what Google do.

Produce the best page about a specific keyword and Google will probably realize it and rank you in its 10 best results.

Your are probably going about this all the wrong way, just as so many others inexperienced in SEO have been going about it, and teaching others to do.First of all... do not research keywords, this is not step one.

Step one is to build a Search Engine friendly website that has accurate descriptive pages that only talk about exactly what is contained on the pages. Make sure it is highly professional and is built to convert with the best sales copy, images, fonts, colors etc. Do this live so you can build up some analytics data as you work.

Step two Is to analyze analytics thoroughly. Find out which keywords your visitors are coming in on, staying a reasonable amount of time, and hopefully even converting. Your job is then to take these keywords and expand on them, and increase focus to them, which will lead to more visitors and hopefully more conversions.

If you can not get your first visitors make sure you have sitemaps, that your site is indexed in the search engine, and that it is all search engine readable. If this continues to be a problem, start working with marketing outside of the search engines in the hope they will notice you more in the future. I have many websites, they all get visitors, even the really small and crappy ones which I have never promoted.

Although, keywords are spoken to be the answer for traffic, it is not the only factor. A well designed website is the first step as Google and other search engine bots will have to pass the test on each web page to make sure it is correctly coded and relevant to what they want on their search engine listings.

Once all that done , than concentrate on long tail keywords. Stuff that other websites to not compete on, this way you will see some organic traffic coming through...

Keyword research means figuring out what phrases and/or words the people you're trying to reach use when they look for things / services you sell.

You do the research by looking up keywords in a keyword planner, by talking to your customer (or customers of businesses like the one you're about to start) and by looking at what your competitors are using.

More people search formortgage broker Chicago then search for asset dissipation mortgage lenders in the area between Lake Michigan and Des Plaines River, just a few miles south of Wilmette (which, by the way, can be a perfectly good and greatly descriptive for a page) and, if they want asset depletion, they search for Chicago mortgage broker asset depletion or Chicago mortgage broker when you don't have assets not income. Or something like that. And it would help you, were you a mortgage broker in the Chicago area that has a program for asset depletion if you knew that you need to rank for Chicago mortgage broker (and varieties) and use asset depletion on your pages and no income but lots of assets.

One such sale, and you've made anywhere between $1500 and 15000, most likely somewhere between $2500 and 5000.

Yes, a bit exaggerated but the exaggeration is needed to make the point clearer.

Yes, you look at your analytics and webmaster tools, but why start a big step behind? Why work harder?

Originally Posted by PBScott

Your are probably going about this all the wrong way, just as so many others inexperienced in SEO have been going about it, and teaching others to do.First of all... do not research keywords, this is not step one.

Step one is to build a Search Engine friendly website that has accurate descriptive pages that only talk about exactly what is contained on the pages. Make sure it is highly professional and is built to convert with the best sales copy, images, fonts, colors etc. Do this live so you can build up some analytics data as you work.

Step two Is to analyze analytics thoroughly. Find out which keywords your visitors are coming in on, staying a reasonable amount of time, and hopefully even converting. Your job is then to take these keywords and expand on them, and increase focus to them, which will lead to more visitors and hopefully more conversions.

If you can not get your first visitors make sure you have sitemaps, that your site is indexed in the search engine, and that it is all search engine readable. If this continues to be a problem, start working with marketing outside of the search engines in the hope they will notice you more in the future. I have many websites, they all get visitors, even the really small and crappy ones which I have never promoted.

Originally Posted by kursat

I agree with above post.

Although, keywords are spoken to be the answer for traffic, it is not the only factor. A well designed website is the first step as Google and other search engine bots will have to pass the test on each web page to make sure it is correctly coded and relevant to what they want on their search engine listings.

Once all that done , than concentrate on long tail keywords. Stuff that other websites to not compete on, this way you will see some organic traffic coming through...

Your are probably going about this all the wrong way, just as so many others inexperienced in SEO have been going about it, and teaching others to do.First of all... do not research keywords, this is not step one.

Step one is to build a Search Engine friendly website that has accurate descriptive pages that only talk about exactly what is contained on the pages. Make sure it is highly professional and is built to convert with the best sales copy, images, fonts, colors etc. Do this live so you can build up some analytics data as you work.

Step two Is to analyze analytics thoroughly. Find out which keywords your visitors are coming in on, staying a reasonable amount of time, and hopefully even converting. Your job is then to take these keywords and expand on them, and increase focus to them, which will lead to more visitors and hopefully more conversions.

If you can not get your first visitors make sure you have sitemaps, that your site is indexed in the search engine, and that it is all search engine readable. If this continues to be a problem, start working with marketing outside of the search engines in the hope they will notice you more in the future. I have many websites, they all get visitors, even the really small and crappy ones which I have never promoted.

Originally Posted by DABK

I fear you do not understand what keyword research means.

Yes I do know what it means, when I said "Your job is then to take these keywords and expand on them" I meant to get out your keyword tools.

I should have realized that my situation is not the same as some others, and my statement is not true for every situation.

In my situation I have specific products I need to sell, extremely competitive products, and I need to beat out the competition for these products. It is my website so I take a very long term approach. Rather than looking for a month or two of burst traffic, I am looking for a slow but steady increase over time. I actually have to buy and store stock so every page has a financial investment in it I wish to get back.

Some people are busy clickbaiting visitors to cash in fast and easy, this is not at all what I do, and my advice would be very wrong for this type of website.

Perhaps in your situation you are looking for a Niche to exploit, if you are looking for a niche perhaps keyword research would come first.

In the old days when I started my website I used to find wonderful keywords first and exploit them, I got tons of traffic that was relevant enough for me to make lots of sales, but irrelevant enough that my engagement was not all that great, which was fine because way back then it wasn't being measured by the search engines and that didn't hurt me, also back then variations, misspellings and various long tail keywords were all needed to help me rake in as many visitors as possible.

Nowadays things I feel are a bit different, if you put a single semi long tail keyword on your page (which you should not do, what you really want are all the highly relevant keywords you can think of without getting too repetitive, or too obscure), search engines will generally send you what I would call your allotted amount of visitors with a broad use of your keywords. Measure them, and rank you up or down for the keywords they use, however knowing things in my business like a t-shirt might be called a jersey or a pullover is defiantly helpful, so there is a certain amount of knowledge you should have on your products, however this is again in my example of having a product you want to sell as step 2, step 1 being building a fantastic website. The website must be as near to perfect as possible before you start spending time on marketing, build it live, and then use analytics for research, The search engines seem to use broad results these days, and what you want more than a bunch of semi relevant long tail keywords, is a highly polished, high converting website with a few extremely relevant, semi long tail keywords to make the most of your "allotment".

Later on find out what converts and emphasize converting keywords. Find out what doesn't and take them off the page.

However once your SEO for the page is done, you are defiantly not finished, then you should go to town marketing it relentlessly in every way you can imagine.

If you're selling blue widgets, you do want to be #1 for blue widgets.

But people who want to buy blue widgets don't search for blue widgets just using the phrase blue widgets.

Also, why bother remove keywords? Are you replacing them with different ones? Why not add new keywords and leave existing keywords in place?

Originally Posted by PBScott

Yes I do know what it means, when I said "Your job is then to take these keywords and expand on them" I meant to get out your keyword tools.

I should have realized that my situation is not the same as some others, and my statement is not true for every situation.

In my situation I have specific products I need to sell, extremely competitive products, and I need to beat out the competition for these products. It is my website so I take a very long term approach. Rather than looking for a month or two of burst traffic, I am looking for a slow but steady increase over time. I actually have to buy and store stock so every page has a financial investment in it I wish to get back.

Some people are busy clickbaiting visitors to cash in fast and easy, this is not at all what I do, and my advice would be very wrong for this type of website.

Perhaps in your situation you are looking for a Niche to exploit, if you are looking for a niche perhaps keyword research would come first.

In the old days when I started my website I used to find wonderful keywords first and exploit them, I got tons of traffic that was relevant enough for me to make lots of sales, but irrelevant enough that my engagement was not all that great, which was fine because way back then it wasn't being measured by the search engines and that didn't hurt me, also back then variations, misspellings and various long tail keywords were all needed to help me rake in as many visitors as possible.

Nowadays things I feel are a bit different, if you put a single semi long tail keyword on your page (which you should not do, what you really want are all the highly relevant keywords you can think of without getting too repetitive, or too obscure), search engines will generally send you what I would call your allotted amount of visitors with a broad use of your keywords. Measure them, and rank you up or down for the keywords they use, however knowing things in my business like a t-shirt might be called a jersey or a pullover is defiantly helpful, so there is a certain amount of knowledge you should have on your products, however this is again in my example of having a product you want to sell as step 2, step 1 being building a fantastic website. The website must be as near to perfect as possible before you start spending time on marketing, build it live, and then use analytics for research, The search engines seem to use broad results these days, and what you want more than a bunch of semi relevant long tail keywords, is a highly polished, high converting website with a few extremely relevant, semi long tail keywords to make the most of your "allotment".

Later on find out what converts and emphasize converting keywords. Find out what doesn't and take them off the page.

However once your SEO for the page is done, you are defiantly not finished, then you should go to town marketing it relentlessly in every way you can imagine.

If you're selling blue widgets, you do want to be #1 for blue widgets.

But people who want to buy blue widgets don't search for blue widgets just using the phrase blue widgets.

Also, why bother remove keywords? Are you replacing them with different ones? Why not add new keywords and leave existing keywords in place?

You seem to be talking about a machine gun approach to SEO where you want all visitors all the time, but I am saying that in today's SEO you should be a sniper. Machine gunners can't make it anymore, there are too many other machine gunners out there already.

Having more keywords dilutes the power of the ones that convert. You want to power up your converting keywords and not waste any precious visits on non covering ones. Eliminate the superfluous. Five years ago I started taking this approach, and have not lost any quantity of visitors but have more than quadrupled my earnings.

Maybe this is not relevant to you because you are selling SEO services to someone to Increase traffic or something, as opposed to actually trying to bring a positive financial ROI to the website owner. So for you just having paid work is already positive financial ROI.

This seems to all be veering away from what the OP was originally asking, I stand behind my original post here. I am not misdirecting anyone, or confused about my goals on the internet. I have supported my family with my SEO and marketing of my own websites for nearly a decade now, and although there is still a lot I need to learn, the things I do are continuing to improve my lifestyle.

I don't know how having an extra keyword on the page dilutes the power of the main keyword. In my world, you can't talk about losing weight without using one or more of: wight loss, quick weight loss, exercise routine, diet and exercise or variations of those.

I don't sell SEO. I am not doing machine gun approach. I just do not see how having one or more extra keywords on the page dilutes anything. Unless you're talking keyword-stuffing. Which is not what I am talking about.

And I don't see the need to eliminate the superfluous: you just don't put it in from the beginning. I don't see how my sites getting visits only from the top 4 keywords (the best converting ones) is better than my site getting visitors from the next 65 (even though the conversions from those are lower, they are there, and it costs me not one penny extra to have those visitors). So, what am I losing?

Originally Posted by PBScott

You seem to be talking about a machine gun approach to SEO where you want all visitors all the time, but I am saying that in today's SEO you should be a sniper. Machine gunners can't make it anymore, there are too many other machine gunners out there already.

Having more keywords dilutes the power of the ones that convert. You want to power up your converting keywords and not waste any precious visits on non covering ones. Eliminate the superfluous. Five years ago I started taking this approach, and have not lost any quantity of visitors but have more than quadrupled my earnings.

Maybe this is not relevant to you because you are selling SEO services to someone to Increase traffic or something, as opposed to actually trying to bring a positive financial ROI to the website owner. So for you just having paid work is already positive financial ROI.

This seems to all be veering away from what the OP was originally asking, I stand behind my original post here. I am not misdirecting anyone, or confused about my goals on the internet. I have supported my family with my SEO and marketing of my own websites for nearly a decade now, and although there is still a lot I need to learn, the things I do are continuing to improve my lifestyle.

I don't know how having an extra keyword on the page dilutes the power of the main keyword. In my world, you can't talk about losing weight without using one or more of: wight loss, quick weight loss, exercise routine, diet and exercise or variations of those.

I don't sell SEO. I am not doing machine gun approach. I just do not see how having one or more extra keywords on the page dilutes anything. Unless you're talking keyword-stuffing. Which is not what I am talking about.

And I don't see the need to eliminate the superfluous: you just don't put it in from the beginning. I don't see how my sites getting visits only from the top 4 keywords (the best converting ones) is better than my site getting visitors from the next 65 (even though the conversions from those are lower, they are there, and it costs me not one penny extra to have those visitors). So, what am I losing?

"wight loss, quick weight loss, exercise routine, diet and exercise"Could be said as : "quick weight loss, diet and exercise routine"
and all keywords would still be present. Repeating keywords is no longer beneficial. The value of all keywords done this way are less diluted.
If "quick weight loss" leads to sales but "diet and exercise routine" does not you could get rid of the second long tail and you will normally get more for your first long tail, since the first becomes less diluted.
However between the two of them you also get visitors from "quick exercise routine", and "diet and weight loss" so you need to see if those are converting also, you may find a better combination over time by analyzing analytics.

Were you under the impression that:
more keywords = more visitors ?

I don't think I can explain my position any clearer. Will have to leave it at that.

Check Google Webmaster Tools to see what phrases your website is appearing for in the search results, even if you aren't getting clicks. Then you know what subjects Google believe are relevant, which can give you more ideas for future content.

Research keywords that are relevant to your niche and website. You can use Google's adword planner, or even Bing's webmaster tools to find suggestions. Use the keyword in your page title, and throughout your page's content.

Do you have an xml sitemap for your site? If not, get one created (if you're using a blog there are plugins for it). Submit that to Google and Bing webmaster tools.

I actually just started a new website back in July, and have pages ranked in Google by using this method. Don't get a ton of traffic yet, maybe 1,000 per day, and not for super high use keywords, but if you keep at it, you'll get ranked.

You want to increase traffic to your website from the search engines right? So how do you go about it? Well…

Building links and increasing your domain authority is one way to do it.

Adding new content is another.

But… it’s also possible to increase your search traffic without having to do either.

Today, I’m going to show you how with 2 case studies:

1. How David Attard increased his search traffic by filling gaps in existing content
2. How I increased search traffic 54% by switching ‘main’ keywords
For the first case study I’m going to hand you over to David Attard (yes, another David) of Dart Creations.

After several successful first page ranking for certain keywords I had a conclusion that #1 position do not guarantee you sales but can guarantee you current traffic. Sometime article or blog post itself can generate a lot of traffic comparable to SERP's related one.
I want to say that you need to have a complex of actions and marketing instruments to get traffic from and do not concentrate all of your efforts to SE only.

I've been trying to rank my site for a few months now, and I can't get a single visitor besides bots. What could I be doing wrong? I checked the robots.txt file to make sure traffic wasn't being blocked, I indexed the pages using Google Webmaster, and I made Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest Accounts...and also a Facebook page. I followed lots of people on Twitter so even have a good number of followers back, but it's harder to do on the other sites...

But I've heard that if you choose low competition niches you don't even need backlinks! I did choose low competition keywords so what am I doing wrong? Anyone else experience this?

Hi twinklingstars.
No matter how low rank the keywords is you've chosen. You still need back links.
to get traffic from search engines without having back links, you would need 10 trillion very well on page SEO optimized pages. And then stiil the quality of the traffic would nod compare to ranking high because of a good back link structure.

Believe me I have tried. I was very reluctant to do back linking. Why?
Because it takes a lot of work.

To write a unique page takes from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours. Back linking takes forever.

And here is my opinion on social media: Twitter is hard to get good results from. Facebook is probably the best. Tumblr is not too bad and the rest I don't really have enough experience to comment on.

You easily can not rank on first page for highly competitive keywords with new domain.
You can go for PPC if you want instant traffic. For organic traffic you have to give efforts and time for rankings. Apply the best content and build powerful SEO strongly site that can be on top 100 results. After that, you can improve ranking numbers.

I've been trying to rank my site for a few months now, and I can't get a single visitor besides bots. What could I be doing wrong? I checked the robots.txt file to make sure traffic wasn't being blocked, I indexed the pages using Google Webmaster, and I made Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest Accounts...and also a Facebook page. I followed lots of people on Twitter so even have a good number of followers back, but it's harder to do on the other sites...

But I've heard that if you choose low competition niches you don't even need backlinks! I did choose low competition keywords so what am I doing wrong? Anyone else experience this?

Can you provide your site? and what are keywords you targered?

Hi Twinklingstars,

Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest ,.. have nothing for SEO. Using these to get traffic is better.

What is your niche?
How do you know your niche is low competitive?
What keywords were you target? Have you researched for your keyword? How many are there people search for?
Have you optimized your on-page SEO yet? If haven't, this might help: backlinko.com/on-page-seo

If your answers are relevant to all questions above. One thing you have to do it build your do-follow backlinks. Black or While hat SEO depends on you and your situation.

Do guest posts on other peoples blogs, there are actually tonnes of places around
- write articles and submit to article directories
- directory submissions
- get on relevant blogs - on the blogroll
- discuss relevant forums with your website since the signature with useful and helpful comments

Do guest posts on other peoples blogs, there are actually tonnes of places around
- write articles and submit to article directories
- directory submissions
- get on relevant blogs - on the blogroll
- discuss relevant forums with your website since the signature with useful and helpful comments

Thanks for the comments everyone! But I like this suggestion the most. I could just need old fashioned traffic, instead of just hoping to rank one day.

If you’ve been reading Blog Tyrant for a while you’ll know that I occasionally warn against relying on Google too much.

And I stand by that.

Organic traffic from Google search is still the most valuable traffic you can get because it grows, it’s free (sort of), and people who are using search engines are usually in a buy-ready frame of mind.

But I've heard that if you choose low competition niches you don't even need backlinks! I did choose low competition keywords so what am I doing wrong? Anyone else experience this?

Low competition keywords most of the time also means low search volume. Even you got it ranked high it may not give you enough traffic. Like what was advised earlier, choose keywords with enough search volume and low competition (if any).

Another thing you should look at is to drive traffic from other places before any of your keywords are ranked high. Places like forums, communities , places where your target market is.

Google rank your page or website based on (what was believed) 200 over ranking factors. But the two most important ones are:
1. Quality Backlinks
2. User experience

This thread is full of bullshit but has also many useful advices that are GENERAL SEO tips. It's true that backlinks and good content are the keys to high ranking, i.e. - traffic.

If it's not your content, then check your backlink profile (and keep working with it on a daily basis). Try to gain more backlinks from relevant sites with high DA.

Run your competitors through Majestic to identify their topical trust flow. This way you will have a wider prospect on their link profiles semantic.

Then, run them through Serpstat to see and download all their referring domains and backlinks. This can provide insight into their backlink strategies. If your competitors are established entities chances are that their backlink profiles are managed properly. Carefully inspecting their actions can be a great source of your growth.

Do On - Page SEO,
Added quality and more quantity contents.
then start Off-page SEO that is submission.. prefer to submit high DA website most important part of submission is maintain the anchor text ratio natural .

Follow these suggestions, and watch your website rise the ranks to the top of search-engine results.
Publish Relevant Content. Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings and there is no substitute for great content. ...
Update Your Content Regularly. ...
Metadata. ...
Have a link-worthy site. ...
Use alt tags.

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